by Mitch Cullin
“It wasn't so bad, actually. I slept most of the way.”
The boy was no older than fifteen, and he stood behind his parents like a shadow, keeping his head lowered. “Hollis, you've probably heard some tales on this one here,” Bill Sr. said, stepping aside, making room for the boy before pointing at him. “That's our Edgar.”
“Of course,” Hollis said, feigning recognition, except he wasn't familiar with Edgar, nor had he previously heard anything about him. The boy struck him as nervous, or scared, or painfully shy—it was hard to tell. Like Florence, Edgar couldn't quite meet his eyes; even when Hollis said, “Nice to see you at last,” the boy's lips seemed to move involuntarily, forming the word “Hi,” but hardly uttered a sound. Then Bill Sr. asked if he had any other luggage, and Hollis raised the suitcase, replying, “Just this.”
Bill Sr. took his son by the elbow, urging him forward: “Edgar, help him with his bag, will you?”
“It's okay, really,” Hollis protested, but the boy had already grabbed the suitcase handle, displacing his fingers.
Gently resting a hand on Hollis's arm, Florence said, “Edgar's got it, don't worry. You've had yourself a tiring trip, and you're our guest now. So let's get you settled in, get you something in your belly. Surely you must be starving.”
“Thank you,” Hollis said, feeling suddenly bewildered. “Thank you,” he said again.
Like a disorganized group of soldiers they marched from the platform, Bill Sr. leading the way and Florence taking up the rear directly behind Hollis. When they finally left the building—Bill Sr. pushing open a door at one end of the station so they could follow him into the blustery night—Florence's lilting voice drifted to Hollis, saying, “Welcome to Claude. We want you to feel at home here—it's important you do that for—” Her sighing tone was cut short with a swift gust of wind and, it seemed, whisked away by the breeze.
But Hollis wouldn't see much of Claude that evening; rather it was an infinite void of darkness which drew his attention, making it impossible to figure out where the land ended and the sky began. And as he was driven farther into the night on a sparsely traveled two-lane highway, away from a smattering of city lights and toward the McCreedys’ farm, a faint rumbling became audible—a sound which increased with every mile, like the mass bellowing of a thousand agonized souls, a lonesome howling he would soon learn was only the West Texas wind crying through the deep, yawning Caprock canyons which lay just beyond the edge of the McCreedys’ property.
With the even light of midday, Hollis was able to get a better sense of his surroundings, to put himself in some context to his new environment when standing alone on the McCreedys’ rickety front porch. The isolated farmhouse was little more than a well-tended wooden shack—box-shaped yet freshly painted white, lacking a proper yard but with a fence enclosing it—dotting a vast prairie which spread out in every direction as a limitless landscape of scrub brush, wild grass, and reddish dirt. Aside from a run-down, slanted barn a few yards off and the spinning blades of a windmill rising up behind its roof like an oversize weather vane, there were no other structures or homes—or the city of Claude—anywhere in sight. But the wind remained a constant companion, if a less tumultuous presence than on the previous night. The slats creaked underfoot while he paced the length of the porch, his soles catching on nails which were slowly freeing themselves, and he peered forward, realizing that all around him, even nearby, were a million patches of earth which had never once felt the influence or weight of a single human being.
How unlikely, it struck Hollis, for him to have awakened there. How circuitous his life had become of late. Then, too, it was as if he had stranded himself on the moon with three strangers who were hard to gauge. Nevertheless, after he had slept contentedly inside their home, what had felt aloof during the first night was more forgivable in the light of the next day. For he had encountered the source of their collective reticence that morning, had caught glimpses from one side of the one-story house to the other. A walnut chifforobe sat in the middle of the living room like an altar, upon which was a folded American flag, three carefully arranged letters and envelopes, a Purple Heart which had been awarded posthumously, a handwritten copy of the Lord's Prayer, and—at the center of it all—a framed portrait of a teenaged Creed, an enlarged black-and-white high-school photograph with a sepia tint and cloudy borders: his chin lifted to accentuate the angle of his jawline, his teeth flashing white and perfect, his thick blond hair slicked back on his scalp, his skin airbrushed into an unblemished surface. Smaller versions of the photograph were scattered throughout the house (on a piano beside a large cross, on a hallway wall beside a dime-store painting of Jesus, on a telephone stand beside a King James Bible), while no photographs of Edgar, or Bill Sr., or Florence were displayed in any room—just that same image of Creed residing within inches of some representation of the Lord.
“Are you redeemed, Hollis?” Florence had asked him earlier, after Edgar had led him to the kitchen for breakfast.
“I believe so,” he answered from where he leaned against the doorway, but somewhere in his mind he thought: No, not really, probably not yet.
“That's nice to hear,” she said in her soft, maternal way, staring down at the stove while frying bacon. “It's getting harder anymore knowing who is or who ain't.”
Crossing back and forth between his mother and Hollis, Edgar had begun arranging five plates, five napkins, five cups, five forks and spoons and butter knives around the kitchen table, of which only four of each would be used. Once everyone sat down to eat scrambled eggs, pork chops, bacon, and toast, the morning prayer was given in complete silence—four pairs of hands clasped before four faces, although only three of the four heads bowed with eyes closed, shifting their bodies toward the unused setting and empty seat where Creed should have been awaiting his breakfast. The surviving McCreedys were, after all, grappling with the loss of either a beloved son or an older brother; they were, Hollis now understood, a family still very much fettered in a state of profound mourning, something they also had expected him to share. Most surely they were people in need of answers in order to assuage the grief, just as he, for less specific reasons, was in need of meaning for his life. That was why they had wished to meet him, he reasoned, and that was why he had decided to travel so far. For them, he was an accessible link to a tragedy which couldn't yet be laid to rest—and, maybe, with him at last present to them there was offered the possibility of acceptance, however meager the detailed truth and circumstances of their son's murder might get parceled.
But if a kind of healing was wanted, perhaps the process had already begun without effort, commencing quietly within the hazy glow of dawn and signaled by the mindful gaze of a boy who, from his bed, spied the broad, snakelike scar on the inner thigh of their guest; for Hollis had slept in the narrow room Creed had occupied with his kid brother, falling asleep on the twin mattress which had previously held the more muscular form of Edgar's military-bound sibling. Now the room had clearly become Edgar's domain with his brother's departure and death, the floor littered by the boy's comic books, battling green army men, model cars, and discarded socks and crumpled overalls. In fact, the room smelled of boy, musty and earthy, like wet dirt. Other than Edgar's clutter, though, there wasn't much else in the room but the two twin beds and a bureau and a chair where Hollis had put his suitcase.
Yet lingering traces of Creed remained evident on the wall above what had been his bed—three triangle-shaped high-school football flags, blue and gold, heralding the Fighting Tigers of Claude as district and regional champs. And on the bureau—in front of which Hollis loitered soon after waking, standing there in just a T-shirt and underwear—was a handful of Indian Head pennies positioned side by side to make the pattern of a cross, along with the tattered, blurry photograph of the girlfriend Creed had claimed he was going to marry someday, and a flat, slender piece of polished metal with hanja characters meticulously carved upon it and which, he had no doubt, had belonged to the m
onk they had seen run down on that desolate road from Yongdong. As he absently scratched at his scar—glimpsing those few items he had either forgotten about or never imagined seeing again in a place like West Texas—it seemed, to Hollis, as if Creed had recently visited the farm, leaving the good luck charms carried in Korea on the bureau before heading elsewhere—except that wasn't quite the case.
Still, Creed had been to Claude since Hollis last saw him alive, although he arrived within a sealed coffin, never making it back to his bedroom at the farm; his possessions, however, were afforded the courtesy, the military having forwarded them ahead of the body. Then how human those things now appeared, how unrelated to Creed they felt, and what had once seemed so cruel or somehow emblematic—the pennies, a memento stolen off a dead monk, even a girl's unfocused face on the curled paper of a ragged photograph—no longer held much significance when studied in the context of a dim farmhouse bedroom, somewhere far removed from the bloated corpses floating among rice fields or piled beneath bridges. And yet, for Hollis, that was where Creed continued to reside in his memory, that was where his version of Creed belonged—roaming assuredly, furiously below Korean hillsides, a cigarette at his lips, his rifle aimed and ready. No, Hollis couldn't envision such a soldier as ever having lived a life at the remote farm—sleeping where he'd slept, going to school and playing sports, growing up with soft-spoken family members—unless, of course, that person was someone more like himself. He pressed a finger over a penny, sliding it out of the cross pattern and along the top of the bureau. Funny, he thought, that these little things outlasted Bill McCreedy—funny that just this stuff and almost nothing else would find its way home to Texas.
When Hollis turned away from the bureau, he saw Edgar was awake and sitting upright in bed, watching him without expression, thick hair pointing wildly in a dozen directions. “Morning,” Hollis said, navigating around a traffic jam of toy cars on the floor, and then he lowered himself to the edge of Creed's mattress, facing the boy whose bed was less than three feet away. “How'd you sleep? Hope I didn't keep you up by snoring.”
But Edgar didn't answer, nor did he now stare directly at Hollis. Instead, the boy's gaze was fixed on the snaking scar, studying the wound with fascination. “It hurt?” he finally said, pointing casually at Hollis's left thigh.
Spreading his legs apart, Hollis glanced at the scar, rubbing a palm along it. “Not so much anymore. Sometimes it does, if I think about it, but mostly it only itches on occasion.”
“Looks like it hurts.”
Edgar scooted forward in the bed, sliding his bare feet out from under the sheets, bringing himself to the edge of his mattress where, as if the boy were trying to see through darkness, he bent forward to peer at the scar.
“Go ahead,” Hollis said. “Feel it if you like, won't bite you.”
At first Edgar looked like he had no intention of getting any closer to the wound, but presently he moved a hand toward the damaged thigh, gingerly easing fingers against Hollis's skin as if he were testing the heat of a flame. “You knew my brother,” the boy said matter-of-factly, two cold fingertips slowly tracing the route of the crooked scar, producing a multitude of goose pimples on Hollis's left thigh.
“I sure did.”
After a second the boy asked, “Was he your best buddy?”
Unsure of how to answer, Hollis gave an indifferent shrug of his shoulders. He then heard himself say, “Sort of, I suppose,” as his body unexpectedly turned rigid from the boy's touch.
“He was my best buddy, too.” Edgar drew his hand back, quickly retracting it to a bouncing knee covered beneath his plaid pajama bottoms. “Think a fella can have him two best buddies?”
“Don't see why not,” Hollis said, giving another shrug.
“Me neither,” the boy said. “Don't see why not neither.” Then Edgar's mouth thinned a bit before he asked, “You miss him?”
“Yes,” Hollis lied without thinking twice, “I do.”
The boy grinned and then, as he had just done with his hand, quickly retracted the expression as if he wasn't permitted to smile. However, in that brief moment, Hollis spotted something familiar on Edgar's benign face, catching a glimpse of the exact same effortless grin he had seen to the point of contempt in Korea. Yet sitting before the boy, Hollis was surprised to suddenly feel a kind of indirect affection for Creed, an unexpected tenderness and warmth he had never thought possible.
“Anyways, you wasn't snoring,” Edgar said. “If you was I'd have told you to shush. Don't like hearing snoring, that's why I don't do it.”
“Fair enough,” Hollis said, smiling at one corner of his mouth. “I don't like hearing snoring either.”
But later that morning—while Hollis stood alone on the porch, waiting for Bill Sr. to come outside and give him a tour around the property—something else was now puzzling him, something he couldn't really sort out in his head; because during breakfast Bill Sr. and Florence had spoken of how glad they were to have him there, how important it was for them to get to know the young man who had been a friend to their elder son and, as Florence told it, was highly regarded in turn. “You meant the world to our Billy,” she had said, seated at the kitchen table across from him. “Most every letter he sent home had some kind of mention of you, said you were like a second brother to him, said you was someone he'd count on in the worst of it.”
“He got a big cut on his leg,” Edgar piped up, raising his right arm and holding it at the elbow. “ ‘Bout this long as this much of my arm here.”
Like a jag of lightning, Bill Sr. struck his fork against Edgar's plate, admonishing the boy with a chewing mouthful of eggs: “Why don't you shut it and eat your breakfast.” Then as Edgar and his arm slumped, Bill Sr. swallowed hard, thrusting his fork at the center of the table to retrieve another pork chop.
“Please forgive Edgar,” Florence said, shooting the boy a quick sidelong glance which was both stern and motherly. “His mouth ails him of late.” Her glare melted when she shifted again to Hollis, and then she sighed: “Just for the life of me, I can't begin imagining what all you boys endure over in a place like that. Except you was blessed to have each other—you and our Billy—and I take great heart knowing that. We all do, Hollis.”
“That's nearer than right,” Bill Sr. agreed with a sullen voice, hunched over where he sat and poking at the food on his plate.
What was said about the letters was mystifying, although Hollis could tell Florence wasn't lying. He saw the truth expressed upon her pale white face, heard it in her gentle, mellifluous voice. She had no reason to lie to him, whereas Creed apparently had reason to lie to her and Bill Sr. and Edgar. The best Hollis could figure was that, when writing home, Creed had simply substituted him for Schubert Tang—perhaps because Schubert had been Chinese instead of white, a person who, by last name only, might have sounded more like the enemy than a friend. But even that didn't make much sense. Then after Florence's unlikely revelation came another consideration—a horrible possibility lacking any logic to it, a horrible realization squirming and growing inside his brain—calling into question his memory of Creed, as well as what he believed he had understood for certain about his days serving overseas: Maybe Creed hadn't lied. Maybe, instead, he was the one remembering everything wrong. Maybe everything had happened in slightly different ways and the reality was too awful for him to have sustained, lest he fall apart at the painful recollection of it. Maybe the facts had escaped him on the morning he and Creed were both shot, rattled from him on the banks of the Naktong, ebbing further, then, in the weeks of recuperation, medication, and alcohol. Maybe—maybe—he had been nurturing lies without realizing it, fitting them into the places where he was no longer able or willing to access the truth.
And soon enough Hollis would be asked to dig among those grievous places in his mind, surprising himself with what was lurking there and, as the words slipped easily and dispassionately past his lips, with what he then heard himself say. For Bill Sr. would take him away fro
m the farmhouse, just the two of them jostled inside a red pickup truck, bouncing along a rutted dirt road which wound down and through a valley of craggy, barren mesquite trees. When the truck growled along a steep hill, climbing higher, the ghostly mesquites began decreasing in number until they were gone. With the trees behind them, the truck topped the hill and an expanse of open fields flooded into view. That over there, Bill Sr. went on to mutter while he drove, was for cotton; that one, too; that one up yonder, that's where oats will sprout come spring. Hollis looked to his left, to his right, up ahead, nodding all the while. Keeping his eyes toward the horizon, Bill Sr. stopped the truck in the middle of the road, turning off the engine. Hollis glanced woodenly at him, saying nothing.
For a minute, Bill Sr. continued looking beyond the mud-spattered windshield with his face set. Then wetting his lips, he lowered his head, staring only at the center of the steering wheel. “Son,” he said in the gravest of tones, “I don't like askin’ you this, ‘cuz it's been hard on you, I know, and I ain't sayin’ it ain't been—but you got to tell me something, ‘cuz there's something I need knowing and it couldn't rightly get asked in front of Flo and the boy. So I promise you I won't be badgering you again on this while you're here—or ever again, I promise—but I'm needing to know how it happened that Billy got himself killed exactly. We already know when and where he got hit, we already know that. We know about that damn sumbitch sniper. We know you was there, too, and how you got hit bad in the leg and, son, that's a mighty rotten thing you had done to you—glad you got that sumbitch back, better believe it. But that's about all we got reported to us, and I can't stomach not knowing the whole story, ‘cuz it was my boy who got killed and I've got me a right to know more than just two-bit information on pieces of paper. So I'm hoping you can shed a little more light for me—and I won't ask again, I promise you that—I just need knowing for my own sake, ‘cuz it'd make a world of difference to me, and I'd sure sleep a ton better by knowing.”
